Uta Barth

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Uta Barth (born 1958 in Berlin) is a photographer. Lives and works in Los Angeles. Barth was a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004-05.

Barth has used photography exclusively in her aesthetic projects, experimenting with depth of field, focus and framing to create photographs that are suggestive rather than descriptive, alluding to places rather than describing them explicitly. Her interiors and landscapes engage the viewer in an almost subliminal way, testing memory, intellect and habitual responses. Her photographs take the complete opposite approach to the famous Dusseldorf school of photographers which include Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky. While they record their subjects in sharply objective archival detail, Barth’s images of interiors, buildings, suburban roads or natural environments are often out of focus, perversely cropped and apparently empty of any foreground subject. Yet what emerges from this reduction and abstraction of subject matter is a body of photographs of extraordinary, haunting beauty, evocative of great moments in the history of painting, or of a cinematic ambience. Barth's work is influential among many contemporary artists and the evolution of her art is watched with great interest by artists and others in the field of contemporary art.

Uta Barth's work is represented in numerous public and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Her work is exhibited regularly and has been shown in one-person and group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the US and Europe including New York, London, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Dusseldorf, Bilbao, and San Francisco.

Barth currently shows at Sies + Höke (Düsseldorf-Wittlae), Andréhn-Schiptjenko (Stockholm), Alison Jacques Gallery (London), ACME.(Los Angeles) and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery(New York).